The Pentagon has designed a massive spy satellite that will dwarf any space telescope ever launched – and it point its sensitive lens back at us.

The Membrane Optical Imager for Real-Time Exploitation (MOIRE) will be capable of capturing 40percent of the surface of the Earth at once. It will be able to beam back real-time high-resolution video and images from anywhere in the world at any time.

The satellite is the brainchild of DARPA, the Pentagon agency tasked with developing the next generation of weapons and technology for the U.S. military.

This is an artist’s rending of the Membrane Optical Imager for Real-Time Exploitation (MOIRE) satellite that the Pentagon hopes to launch to spy on the earth.

This is one of the membrane panels from a prototype of the MOIRE satellite that completed testing on earth.

And it relies on a remarkable technological advancement that could increase the power and precision of space telescopes by several fold – while making them less costly, Wired magazine reports.

MOIRE uses massive membranes that will be shot into orbit collapsed, but once aloft, can expand to 68 feet in diameter.

Currently, the largest ground-based telescope is about half that size. The space-based Hubble Telescope is less than eight feet in diameter.

The membrane will be the thickness of household kitchen wrap, but will diffract light – instead of reflecting it or refracting it with mirrors like traditional glass optics.

Massive: This drawing shows how much bigger MOIRE is designed to be (68 feet) compared to the Hubble Space Telescope, the W.M. Keck Observatory telescope – which is one of the largest ground-based instruments in the world – and the James Webb Space Telescope, a device planned for launch in 2018.

This is a prototype full lens of the MOIRE satellite. There is no launch date for the telescope yet, but developers say it is in its final phase

Until now, the scope and precision of space telescopes was limited by the size of their lens, which are quickly becoming too heavy and expensive to carry into space – even for the largest rockets.

‘Membrane optics could enable us to fit much larger, higher-resolution telescopes in smaller and lighter packages,’ Lieutenant Colonel Larry Gunn, a program manager for MOIRE, told Wired.